Joyce Carol Oates

It’s a new experience for me to see JCO doing stuff that is not really her style, but seems borrowed from the zeitgeist around her. For example in The Transformation of Vincent Scoville she lampoons literary academia. Vincent is assigned the task of making a scholarly study of a bequest the college has received – the love letters of some niece of Rudyard Kipling. “These holdings are so valuable that they were specially weather-proofed, you know, and treated in a delicate series of chemical air baths …”

We meet the other staff, the department’s poet, “who even had a book to his credit”, and who complains that the secretaries make constant mistakes when typing out his poems for publication. And the neurotic, psycho-babbling Sondra who could have just wandered in off a Woody Allen set. Hell, it has never occurred to me before that JCO must have watched Woody Allen films. Imagine her watching “Everything You Alway Wanted to Know About Sex”. No, I can’t.

In Customs she executes the precisely delineated task of depicting the 20 minute blast of anxiety on being stopped at a border. The story evokes a dizzy dread that the woman being questioned is on the cusp of a disintegration of civil confidence, a descent into degradation. The shadows of twentieth century history hang over this short piece. Indignation, guilt, anxiety, and a desparate attempt to reassert normality all contend in a vortex dragging her down — and then the uniformed official waves her on.

In another story JCO tries on the role of a Catholic priest. It’s interesting but not totally convincing.

Most of the stories have a unifying theme – they read as though sketched out in advance. This gives the reader a grounding. Any elusiveness is in the thought-processes she is trying to capture, not in the prose technique. The most closely-observed realism is given shape by a philosophical insight that makes you stop on the page and ask: are ordinary people really like that? Are they not perhaps more simple?